Unknown - Cat_In_A_Midnight_Choir-spaces_ru

“Molina has no personal interest in all this.”

“Are you sure?”

“Molina? She’s the Great Stone Mountain of the Metropolitan Police Department.”

“Are you sure?”

Matt let his mind pull back, start wondering.

“Why is she so down on Max? Why does she never let up? Does she need a fall guy? Why does she try to use you to split Max and me apart? Does she really want Max? You? You’ve been thinking of her as a job, a function, a career, not as a human being. As a woman. Maybe she has agendas you haven’t even imagined.”

“And if she does, what was her agenda in showing you the ring? Now?”

They both paused, breathless, to consider their own charges.

“‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’” Temple quoted Sir Walter Scott.

“‘When first we practice to deceive’? That’s not what we have here. I don’t think anyone wants to deceive,” Matt said. “But to protect.”

“Protecting means you put yourself above the protected. You know better.”

“It’s a parental role, yes.”

“Or a priest’s?”

“Or an undercover operative’s?”

“Or a policewoman’s?” Temple, laughed, not happily. “I guess lowly PR flacks are stuck being the protectees. Nothing noble and elevating about my job.”

“Temple.”

“I am tired of being protected by people meddling in my life for my own good. It’s my life. I’m allowed to mess it up all by myself.”

“But not to lose it.”

“That’s what you’re really worried about?”

He nodded, unable to speak, to voice the anxiety.

She relaxed a little.

“There’s something you’re not telling me, too. Just like Max and the lieutenant. Join the club. I hate what people do to you for your own good. I hated it when I was five years old and I hate it worse now.”

“It’s worse when they think about doing something to you for their own good, and not yours.”

Her eyes grew suddenly shrewd. “That’s what almost happened a little while ago with you, didn’t it?”

He nodded miserably.

That seemed to cheer her up considerably. “You were being selfish, really?”

“Irresponsible,” he admitted. Almost lethally irresponsible.

“So it wasn’t my own good you were thinking of?”

“For a few, unforgivable seconds, no.”

Temple let out a huge breath. “Well. At last! Somebody who’s acting like a human being around me. What a relief!” Her voice grew mischievous, if not quite flirtatious. “We’ll have to try it again sometime.”

Matt bent to pick up her groceries.

“I’ll take the stuff in. Just go while you’re ahead. That’s what they say at the craps tables.”

He did.

He had never been so close to the perfect end of the fairy tale, but he realized that the witch would have been waiting to extract her price anyway. Temple wasn’t his way out, no matter that she was the most tempting way out. He’d have to find another one.

That’s when he knew that there were no perfect endings, just endless wishes that there were.

Disappearance Inc.

I have spent the night not panicking.

This is hard to do when you are locked in a closet in a strange house that is hidden behind a forgotten cemetery. Especially when sharing said closet with you is a bunch of spooky magician’s gear and a stiff stretched out on the floor like a rug du jour.

I mean this guy — and I have pussyfooted enough over the corpus delicti in the dark to know that it is a guy — is harder than the concrete they wrapped around Ugly Hugo Manicotti’s tootsies before taking him to diving school in Lake Mead back in ’59.

Eventually I settle down to the head’s-up detecting I am noted for and realize that my closet corpse is so wooden for a reason: he is a giant-size Pinocchio, a mere dummy probably used in some body-switching illusion or another.

This is what comes of taking a supposed relative for a partner: the usually canny operative loses all sense of proportion when the partner in question goes missing.

I revise my previous conclusions. If Miss Louise had figured out the dead guy is really just deadwood, she would have had no compunction about moving on from our point of entry to other, more interesting, and thus more perilous, places. We two need to have a serious talk about not pressing forward on our own, leaving the senior partner in the dark quite literally.

I tromp over Dead Fred’s nose, which is not prevaricatingly long (although the dummy maker must have had a sick sense of humor as something else on this anatomically correct stiff is), and nose the door open a smidge with my own admirably proportioned schnoz.

That it obliges my nudge tells me Miss Louise has gone this way. I slip out into the semidark and pull the door almost shut again.

Of course I am at a loss, while Miss Louise has obviously scouted this terrain previously.

I am really going to bawl her out for numerous acts unbecoming to a partner when I find her. I eye the room. It is vast, shadowy, and smells of mothballs and dustballs. I am guessing it is a mostly unused storeroom. The Cloaked Conjuror had hit Las Vegas like a leopard-spotted tornado only months ago. I imagine clandestinely finding and purchasing this hideout was a difficult job, and did not leave much time for dusting every nook and cranny.

Housekeeping is such a bore anyway, which is why it is better done by the female of the species. I note with disgust that my particular female of the species has carefully used her fluffy rear member to blur her distinctive footprints across the wood-plank flooring.

I must follow in her footsteps, but more slowly, lacking the builtin feather duster, as my aft member is long, strong, and buzz-cut. See what I mean about females being suited for domestic tasks?

After backing to the door and doctoring my trail with dust-busting swipes from my front mitts, I am able to nose another door open and survey a long hallway with the kind of railing that nasty Damien kid from the Omen films would love to push an unwary relative over.

I am nobody’s unwary relative, not even Miss Louise’s, so I look sharp both ways before pulling the door almost shut behind me — I believe in rapid retreats — and tiptoeing down the long, thread-bare carpet that looks like something Queen Elizabeth tossed out at Windsor Castle. After the fire.

Wherever my wandering waif has gone, it is somewhere in a decaying mansion filled with the ancient traces of — I sniff the air — rats, bats, and…cats!

Somehow I do not believe that Miss Midnight Louise all by her lovely self in a few hours has accounted for the distinct attar of cats I sense in the air. Nor is that a lingering scent of days gone by, as is the essence of rat and bat.

These are contemporary cats. Alarmingly current cats, and of a strange, potent, malodorous breed I have not encountered before, not even in my wide and long travels.

That darn brat! She has rushed in where her elders would hesitate to tread, and now I have to get her out of trouble before anything drastic happens. I sniff again, though I am sadly lacking the specialized skills of even the smallest breed of dog. Ah! A waft of willfulness. An odor of the nunnery. A scent of superiority. Midnight Louie has his quarry and he will hunt her down.

Easier vowed than done.

I soon discover that the house is vast and rambling, a shadowed stucco labyrinth accessorized with enough black wrought-iron railings and lighting fixtures and hardware to supply the Spanish Inquisition for a couple hundred years.

Corners that aren’t occupied by vintage magical artifacts are the property of empty suits of armor or such wall ornaments as fully loaded medieval cross-bows.

While human occupation seems distinctly sparse, I scent enough passing cat tracks to make me think the place is haunted by unseen felines. Maybe Los Muertos are really Los Gatos Muertos.